Real Steel (2011)

There are several reasons that boxing and/or fighting movies tend to be the cream of the sports movie crop.  One of the most important is that it’s a sport where there’s often so much at stake. The characters hop into the ring knowing that they’re going to take a beating, and in some cases they may sustain injuries that could be fatal. Yet to these protagonists, for whatever reason, saddling up for a fight is always worth it. This is the principal reason why Real Steel should be an abhorrent failure: it completely removes that element from the equation. Instead, it is about a world where the sport of choice is robot boxing, which means characters build their own fighting machines and throw them into the ring to do all the fighting for them. In an instant, all real risk is gone, along with any real tension on the part of the audience. So a robot loses a fight. Who cares? Take ‘em in for an oil change or something. Amazingly, Real Steel is never as intolerable as it should be, even if it’s never particularly good. (In fact, by the end it’s just ridiculous.) It spends most of its time alternating between frustrating clichés and impressively effective moments, but all in all it’s a movie that exists merely to anger no one. It takes a truly cold-hearted person to outright hate Real Steel, but it’s just as easy to greet it with indifference.

If Real Steel succeeds at all, it’s because of the lead performance of Hugh Jackman; an actor about as detestable as a basket full of kittens. He plays Charlie Kenton, an ex-boxer who moved into the robot boxing game once actual human boxing ceased to exist. He owes a lot of people money, keeps getting into fights he can’t win, and is just an arrogant man in general (as they all are. Through various circumstances he is forced to care for his long-lost son (Dakota Goyo) after the death of his ex-girlfriend, so he spends the summer introducing his son to the world of robot boxing. Before long they find an old-fashioned piece of robot junk named Atom who suddenly takes the world by storm. As movie law dictates, Real Steel will cumulate with a “big fight,” this time against über-robot Zeus. Will Atom stand toe-to-toe against a seemingly unbeatable opponent? I will never tell.

One of the most impressive aspects of Real Steel is the strangely plausible future it creates despite the ludicrous subject matter. While most of the robots are just cartoons that never seem like they actually exist in any physical universe, the world around them isn’t as outlandish as you usually see in movies like this. Real Steel suggests that the near-future won’t necessarily catapult us into a world of hovercrafts and time travel; it’s basically the place we have now, only with a few flashy technological touches. This was a smart move by the filmmakers. Instead of over-playing the absurdity of the proceedings, it grounds them in a realistic world that doesn’t seem so outlandish. This is compounded by the sincere performances of everyone involved, from Jackman in the lead role to supporting turns by Evangeline Lilly and Anthony Mackie. No one in Real Steel is alerting you to just how ridiculous everything is, and as a result you more or less buy into it.

You know what’s far less successful in Real Steel? Just about everything else. The screenplay by John Gatins (based on a Richard Matheson short story) does little more than sleepwalk through cliché after cliché without throwing any real flavor on top of it. Almost none of the characters have anything depth to them outside of the obvious, and none of the robots—not even Atom—have any personality to speak of. While the film does a good job of making its leads sympathetic, everything else just falls by the wayside. There are characters in this film who come and go as the script requires, and some of them are just as cartoonish as the robots at the film’s center. (In particular, Kevin Durand gives his character an over-the-top cowboy accent that no actual human being has had, ever.) Real Steel is a film that does precisely the minimum amount of work needed to makes itself tolerable and intermittently entertaining, but makes no effort to go for much more.

Of course, this is how one could describe the entire oeuvre of director Shawn Levy. He is the man who directed both Night at the Museum movies, Date Night, Cheaper by the Dozen, and a several other broadly pleasing films from the past decade or so. As has become the law in Hollywood: if you want to make a relatively safe film that will appeal to many and not get the critics completely bent out of shape, then you give it to Shawn Levy. The same holds true with Real Steel. This is not a great film, but it is an okay one that will likely push all the right buttons with most movie audiences. It will make a lot of money, satisfy the public and fade away until it becomes a footnote at most. It’s mediocre Hollywood cinema at its finest.

Grade: C+